It started quietly, with a handful of posts on tech forums and Reddit explaining why and how you should uninstall and unsubscribe from ChatGPT. Now the campaign #QuitGPT has more than 4 million participants worldwide, and the numbers are still climbing. FRANCE 24 tech journalist Charlotte Lam tells us more.
The #QuitGPT campaign initially gained momentum in the US, driven by two grievances: a substantial donation made by OpenAI president Greg Brockman to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc., and reports that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) uses a screening tool powered by ChatGPT-4. But it was that recent deal with the White House that sent the campaign global.
On February 28, OpenAI signed an agreement to deploy its AI models on the Pentagon's classified network, just hours after its main rival, Anthropic, had publicly refused to do so. Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude, stated it could not in good conscience agree to terms that might enable mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.
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The #QuitGPT website claims more than four million people have taken action, without providing further details. More concretely, Forbes reported earlier this month that 1.5 million people left the platform in the immediate aftermath of the Pentagon deal, and mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower also recorded an around 295 percent spike in ChatGPT app uninstalls above the usual daily baseline.
There's always this question about the secret number [of people taking part in a boycott needed to see change]," American University Professor Dana Fisher, who specialises in activism, told FRANCE 24.
"The number needs to be very high – it needs to be proportionate to the number of users there are. For AI companies, it's all about the degree to which these pushbacks are being experienced and the ways people are pushing back. If companies see this in their bottom line, and that's what the #QuitGPT campaign is all about – getting people to commit to using AI less and even to cancelling subscriptions – that will matter."
She added: "We know that consumer actions and campaigns can be really effective in getting companies to change policies. Although I'm not sure their ask is really feasible, in that these companies aren't going to go away. The transition to making AI part of our everyday lives – that train has left the station."
Fisher, who was cited in MIT Technology Review's coverage of the campaign, said that the real test was whether online action translates into material consequences.
"This does seem to be reaching more people in a new way: [Hollywood actor] Mark Ruffalo signed on to help the campaign a couple of weeks ago and that's been really helping to draw more attention," she said.
"But for me, it'll be more telling when we see people who are not the people who always stand up, standing up and taking notice. We haven't seen that yet."
Ethics is now a competitive advantage in the AI race – and Anthropic may be proving it. The company gained market share not through a product launch or a marketing campaign, but by declining a contract.
Meanwhile, cracks are showing at OpenAI. Despite billions in revenue, some tech analysts project the company will lose $14 billion by the end of 2026. ChatGPT is also set to get advertisements – something CEO Sam Altman once called a "last resort". Following public backlash over the Pentagon deal, which he admitted to be being "opportunistic" and "sloppy", the CEO announced that the company would add language to its White House agreement explicitly prohibiting its systems from being used to spy on Americans.
Fisher also told FRANCE 24 that she was hesitant to draw direct comparisons of #QuitGPT to past boycotts, pointing out that many high-profile online campaigns, including the viral movement to stop the Willow Project in Alaska, which trended on TikTok with millions of posts, ultimately failed to produce real-world change.
"Then there was also the campaign to boycott Spotify when they were running ads to recruit people to work for ICE – that's basically the same technique, and that seems to have worked, gaining momentum at the end of 2025," she said. "But this campaign is not that different. What we are seeing is attention drawn by people from all walks of life and all stages of life, which is new. But the campaign and the ask itself is not unique."
#QuitGPT organisers are actively directing people toward competitors: Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and open-source alternatives. Debates about AI safety guardrails and corporate accountability have long been confined to academics and experts, but more and more is reaching the mainstream.
As Fisher puts it, the campaign matters not just for what it asks people to do, but for the systemic conversation it is forcing: "What tends to be lost when we focus on a specific tool like ChatGPT is the way it's representative of a larger shift, the ways technology companies are leaning into AI in ways whose consequences are extremely material."
FRANCE 24 contacted OpenAI for comment.
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